Super Soul Special: Stephen Colbert: Finding Your Stride

0:00I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. Stephen Covey!

0:28Hey! Hey. Thank you. Thank you.

0:36Thanks for saying yes. Thanks very much. Thanks for saying yes. You, I did not think, would say yes. How? I can't say no. Yes, I thought you were going to, you know what? You don't say no to oh. Oh, thank you. I was so excited. And it's been six years since you got, you, I've sat down for an interview that you're conducting. Yes. I miss it. Yes, I came down to your home and did that. But this is the interesting thing. When you're doing a daily show, I understand that it's kind of hard to take a break in the middle of that day. No, you don't even leave to have lunch. You don't even leave your desk at all.

1:07You don't leave your desk at all. No. So why'd you say yes? I want to know what you want to ask me. I don't know. Because I'm tired of me, but if you're interested... I'm very interested. ...that makes me feel better about myself. I'm very interested in you. Oh, thank you. And we had a great conversation once before, but I just wanted to say that I think you're better than ever. I think something happened to you. This is why I came up. This is why I came up today. I'm good. Thank you very much. You're the best. I think we just peaked. I don't want to... All right, well, we're having a really good time.

1:47You know, we're... To do a daily show, you've got to care about it. You know, to do the grind, do 200 hours a year. That is absolutely right. You've got to care about what you're talking about. And we're living in consequential times. And the opposite of, like, it getting you down, it actually fires you up because you want to talk about it. You want to get it out. You want to have a sense of community with the audience. That's what we want more than anything else. It's like we want to tell jokes and thereby build a community of people who can all share their feelings with each other. I get to say all the words, but we're sharing our feelings with each other because they're laughing back, you know?

2:20Because you don't want to be alone. It's a lonely time. This feels like a lonely time right now. Yeah, and you're usually the last voice we hear before we go off to sleep. And so do you feel like... Makes me sound like a daily executioner. No. Do you feel... Does that come with a responsibility or you're not thinking about responsibility? Our responsibility is to make jokes on whatever the conversation today was. Like, we try not to ever, like, break news for the audience. We want to keep aware of what the national conversation is today and then give our opinion about it because jokes are opinions.

2:57Because if you're breaking news... This is an interesting thing. If you're breaking news, and I'm just hearing the news from you, I'm going to have the reaction of somebody who's just hearing the news. It's hard if you're breaking the news to make that break funny, right? Right, depending on what the news is. But there's not a lot of funny news these days. No, you want the audience, what we want to do is we want to be an addition, a catalyst to what they've been thinking all day. People come to the show at the very end of the day, they've been thinking about something that happened all day, and we go, yeah, we've been thinking about it too.

3:30Here's what we think. You know, we kind of present their day back to them with some jokes. Yeah. And it makes that day better, hopefully. Okay, so, you know, Super Soul Conversations are all about looking inside yourself, finding the best of your being and all of that, you know. So when you first, you know, it's a big thing stepping into that role. Yeah. Where David Letterman was in that theater. Were you, can you honestly tell me, was there a part of you that was a little scared? Oh, of course. Of course. If you're not nervous, you're not trying. I didn't know... Everybody went, oh, yes, tweetable moment.

4:06No, you should sweat a little bit. You should sweat a little bit. Yeah, of course. I don't mean just nervous. I mean, like, a real, like, am I up to that? Well, there was certainly, certainly in the first few months of the show, I was so exhausted by the effort that we were throwing into it. It kind of wasted effort in some ways that we were putting into it that I wasn't sure whether I could keep the energy level up necessary to find it. Because we were trying to find what the show was going to be. Because it couldn't be what the other show was. It couldn't be what the other show was. It couldn't be what Dave's show had been.

4:39Right. Because he already had that gig. Already had that gig. And so what was hardest, I wouldn't say scared, but the thing that actually took the calcium out of your bones was you have to do this with humility because you're doing it. You're trying to find something that you don't know how to do yet in front of millions of people. You have to do it publicly. And that's humbling. Because you have to admit, okay, I haven't found it yet. Yeah. And so the thing about it, for those of you who don't have public jobs, the thing about when you have a public job and you're trying to find it, every mistake you made is a public mistake.

5:15Right. Right. So you make an error, everybody else knows it. There's no rehearsal. Yes. People are always saying, your first attempt at that thing. Yeah. So do you think that you found your stride after the 2016 election? Do you think you found it? I think we found it internally. I think we found it before the election actually happened, during the election, because we had... You know my executive producer, Chris Lick. I love Chris Lick. Chris came over from CBS this morning because we didn't have a showrunner. I was the showrunner, which was not a great idea because I'm a control freak, and if you let me, I will touch everything on the show, everything I'm allowed to.

5:52And...

5:56Very good.

6:01With permission. With permission. With permission.

6:06And Chris came in and says, well, you're really good at this thing. You're really great about making jokes about what just happened today. Just do that, and I'll take everything else off your plate. That was in April of 2016. And so we did that, and we figured out how fast can we do that. And to do that, we did live shows. I think we did 15 live shows. I actually think Chris Lick, I'm going to give... Y 'all don't know Chris Lick, so I'm just going to say this. I think there's a little bit of genius producer in him. Oh, yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt, because he actually had the idea also for...

6:36First of all, he did Morning Joe, that idea. Created Morning Joe. Created Morning Joe. And the new CBS This Morning. And then the new CBS This Morning, and he had the idea for Gail to go on that show with Charlie. And when Gail first said to me she was going to do that, I said, that is the worst idea I ever heard. What makes you think that show's gonna work? And she goes, well, Chris said... And he was absolutely right. Absolutely right. Well, I immediately thought that he was a good idea. Yeah. You did. I immediately thought it was a good idea because running a morning show, I think, is a lot like running a nightly show.

7:09You know, it's mostly... It's the grind. The thing about doing one of these shows that it's hard to explain is... I love doing the show for the audience, you know? 51 % of my joy is what you see. 49 % of the joy is what did it take to get there? that's the process I love process I love seeing how things are put together that's why I love cooking shows I love Chopped three secret ingredients you don't get to see until you start cooking at the end of it you have to have a meal that's what every day is like on a nightly comedy show these are the three stories those are your three ingredients that you didn't find out until you walked in that morning and you have to make a meal for the audience that night you have to curate it you have to cook this thing up for them and that requires a very tight process.

7:52You need to know how to do, everyone needs to know how to do their job, stay in their lane and he made that happen for us so that we were ready for Donald Trump to happen because if we hadn't done that work, you know, if we hadn't done all those live shows, if we hadn't seen how fast we could cook, then we wouldn't have been ready for a president who changes the news every 15 minutes. Yeah. And it's not, that's not an exaggeration. He changes the news every 15 minutes. Aren't you amazed at how the country has become kind of obsessed about it, though? I'm amazed at the speed. I'm not amazed with the obsession because he, A, wants the attention, knows how to get it.

8:35He's a very good showman. And everything he does is of consequence. He is the most important man on the planet. So we should be amazed. Yeah. And so, I don't want to spend our great time here just talking about Trump, but I will say that every time he does something, do you all as a team, you get together, you sit and you talk, you think, how are we going to use this? Well, A, we're never not together. We're never not together. We're always together. Yeah, it's always, we're always, listen, we all follow his Twitter feed. Yeah. And we're all watching the news all the time. And the moment anything happens, I already know that my head writers, Opus Moresky and Jay Ketzier, my creative executive producer, Tom Purcell, they're already working on it.

9:20But you told me years ago that you didn't think it was your job to influence people. So you're not trying to influence people. Or have you changed that? I'm there to influence how they feel. Okay? Because I'm telling them how I think, and I'm getting a laugh out of them. I want to make them feel better. You know? They already have their own thoughts about today's news. Then I give them my thoughts about today's news. And then hopefully the best thing I can do is make them feel better about it. Make them not be afraid. That's what my goal is, to make the audience not be afraid. Because then they'll know what they actually think.

9:51Because when you're afraid, you can't think. The fear, as Frank Herbert says in Dune, fear is the mind killer. But if you're laughing, you can't be afraid. And so if you laugh, I know you can think. And I'm here to help you think about what happened today by making you laugh. If you laugh, we know you can think. I think that's fantastic. You coined the word truthiness, you know. Yes, I did. You did. And now we're living in the era of fake news and the post-truth era we are. What do we do without the facts? Your own research. Because the facts will always matter. The facts will always matter. You know, one of the things that happened when we saw Donald Trump, you know, become elected, I had a conversation with one of my head writers, Jay Katzier.

10:38We were talking about where do we stand? And I said, we stand on this island called reality. We just stand on this island of reality and we refuse to be budged from it. I will not believe your lies, no matter how many times you repeat them. You know, that Apple ad on CNN is kind of the same idea. This is an apple, no matter how many times people call it a banana. You have to hold on to facts. That's a really good ad. If you surrender facts, that's one definition of insanity, is choosing your own reality. Right, right. And so Donald Trump and his cohort are trying to constantly gaslight you to say that the thing you see, the thing you know, isn't true.

11:17And the amazing thing about Donald Trump is everything you learn about him, everything you thought about him, when you find out the truth, turns out to have been true. There's nothing in Michael Wolff's book, Fire and Fury, there's nothing there that surprised us. the most surprising thing was that, oh, we were right when we saw it. It was right in front of us the entire time. So, okay, I'm going to move on from Trump. Hold on to facts. Hold on to facts.

11:45You do a daily show. You're the number one late night show. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yes. On television, your name is, on the side of the building. It is. Yes, it is. How do you keep that ego in check? Wow. That assumes that I do.

12:14How do you keep the ego in check? Oh, I married a wonderful woman, Evie McGee, who married me when I wasn't famous, and she's just as happy with that guy. And I had my children, you know, in my 30s, and I didn't get famous until I was in my 40s or have, like, sort of show business success. So I don't think they perceive of me as a famous person. I mean, I remember when I was younger, one of my kids asked me, Dad, will you always be famous? And I'm like, no, it could go away tomorrow. I could say the wrong thing, and it just all evaporates. And I said, but it doesn't really matter. Fame is a way to...

12:49Fame is a tool that allows you to work more. That's the value of it. All we want to do is work. I just want to go to work every day and do what I love to do. Fame allows you to do that thing. So I keep that in mind, that the fame is not important in any way other than I keep the gig. Yeah. Do you like it, though? Do you like it? Do you like the fame? I like the fame when I'm going to buy, like, mulch at the garden store. And one of the college kids whose summer job is to, like, load mulch out to your car will bring it all the way out to my car, like, without me having to ask him. Like, that's the level of fame that is useful.

13:24Everything above that is, like, I'm very happy. I'm so happy to meet fans I'm happy to do photos or signatures or anything like that. And even, like, press attention, you know? They're just doing their job. But I think it could be gone tomorrow, and I'd get over it pretty quickly. Do you feel the same when you're number one as when you're number two? Nope.

13:55Thanks for being truthful about it. That's right. You just don't, do you? No. It feels a little better. It feels a little better. It feels a little better, yeah. It's really great, because it's just one less thing to have to... You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about that. Yeah. There's really, like, what I found out is, like, I worked in cable for years, and ratings didn't really matter that much in cable. It was, like, how much press you got, you know, what was being written about you, maybe to a certain extent, but they only showed my ratings literally once a year when I was at Comedy Central.

14:25Yeah. And it's a different beast when I went to network, which I learned. It's like, no, it's really important. That was something I had to learn, you know? Right. So it's much better being number one. There's only one answer, which is the only way to get it off your back is to be number one. That is true. Okay, let me ask you this. Who tells you the truth? I had a conversation with Henry Kravis once. This is just when I was starting out. And I was learning to ski. And for some reason, I ended up in Henry Kravis. He was a very famous businessman with a lot of money. And he said, you need to be careful because when you're in positions of power, and I forget this, he said, pretty women and rich men and powerful men never hear the truth.

15:07So you have to surround yourself with people who are willing to tell you the truth. The truth. So, who are your truth tellers? Has Henry Kravitz ever talked to Donald Trump? Because that would be a good conversation for him to have. My wife tells me the truth. My kids tell me the truth. Chris Licht tells me the truth. I've worked with the same agent and the same publicist for, you know, respectively, like, 13 and 20 years. So they've all known me forever. So here's the thing. Maybe I have a lot of people not telling me the truth around me, but I don't know. I don't know that they're not telling me the truth because they all seem like honest people to me, and they've certainly told me things I don't want to hear.

15:51Okay. And do you take that well? Yeah, I think I take it pretty well. I tell you what I don't do is I don't read press about myself. I stopped doing that after the correspondence dinner in 2006. Really? Because there was so much written about that. I mean, my wife saved it all. There were like books and books of it. And I read one good review and one bad review, and I'm like, all right, that's fine. That's enough. But because you can't win, because if you read press about yourself, I know I will. I'm self-reflective enough that I'll take that criticism and internalize it and then never let it go.

16:23I'll always be thinking about the way I do things. And it's like, you can't think about thinking. You can't think about breathing. You'll choke on your own tongue. So I just do my best, and then people tell me, like, hey, things are good for you. Well, and the other thing is, if you believe the positive, you also have to believe the negative. So that's a good reason not to. Twitter is dangerous in that regard. Yes. So with all the anger and the chaos and the division that we're experiencing, I still have a sense that what people are really looking for, are searching for is connection and some form of meaning and discernment.

16:56And you seem to be a voice of discernment. From all the noise, do you feel that from your audience, that you're sort of the discerner, you're sort of the filter, trying to give us a perspective on what all of the news is saying? I think a little bit so. I think that's part of the job is to, again, what happened in the news today? What have people been talking about all day long that you've seen on your Twitter feed, you've seen online, you've seen in the news, you've read in the papers? Which of those do we think are actually the important stories? Which of the ones affected us when we saw them?

17:33And what did we think about them? And that slight curation of today's news where we try to filter out some of the noise, what's just, and if it is just sort of PR as opposed to news, you know, the old definition of news is news is what someone else doesn't want you to print. Everything else is PR. And so we try to discern between the news and the PR. And then if it is PR, we call it that in so many words. But then when we talk about the news that people have been thinking about all day, what we're really, as I said before, trying to do is just establish a sense of connection and community to say to the people out there, and this goes back to like there are such things as facts, to say, hey, that thing you're thinking, you're not crazy to think it.

18:15Don't let people tell you that the world is not the way you perceive it because there are objective truths, there are objective reality, and we are presently living in an administration that wants to convince you that you're crazy. And so the sense of community is you're not crazy. What you think is happening is. so do you feel that i've i've sensed this from your show do you feel that a voice such as yours and other you know people who have these platforms are are more central than ever that your your role has been elevated to something more than being you know the late night comedian i don't i don't know if it's been elevated that's up for the audience to perceive it's all in the audience's eyes but like i had a friend who once said you can't say you don't influence people yeah because Because that's up for them, the audience, to say.

19:03You can't take away if you are influencing them. So that's fine if people feel that there's some elevated level to what we do. But we're still using the same tools. And we still have the same objective. Which is to make comedy about something that we care about. And the news is about important subjects. But it doesn't mean that our work is more important than ever. It's just the news is more compelling than ever right now. Because we're in a time of tremendous change. And you feel an urgency to talk about it every day. And writing with urgency, it just makes for better work. So I think people are eager for someone to explain their day back to them with the same emotional urgency that they experience.

19:41Which is exactly what I feel when I'm watching your show, that you got the day explained back to me with a level of discernment. So thank you for that. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for that. You know, I had an interview with Norman Lear not too long ago, and he said something that I'd never thought of in this way. He said watching an audience laugh is a lot like an offering of prayer. He said he used to stand behind audiences during the taping of his shows, and when they laugh, notice this now when you all do this, that when the audience laughs, they rise together, and there's a movement where they lean forward in their seats and bend down, and then they kind of rise up again.

20:19and he said that that offering, based on whatever you're saying, is like gratitude. Is like gratitude. Yeah, sure. No, that makes sense. I wish I'd said that. Do you sense that, though? Sure. When you're looking at your audiences? Somebody says something that sounds true to you and makes you laugh. There is a sense of, like, thank you. Yes. Thank you for saying that. Because you can't laugh. I know you've said you can't laugh and be afraid at the same time. Right, right, right. Right, right. And our present president was elected on the back of fear. So that's a particularly useful tool to have right now.

20:56So you are a practicing Catholic? Yep. And how does your faith sustain you is what I want to know. Not many Catholics here tonight. Or if there are, they're not willing to admit it. Yeah. How does my faith sustain me? Yeah. Well, my mother used to say that in hardships in your life, try to look at this moment in the light of eternity. You know, let's try to see this how God might see it, which is, we can't see it as fully as God might see this moment, this now, as opposed to the past or the future, which we can't affect in any way. But you can try to see this present moment, if it's good or bad, any hardship or victory, with humility, with acceptance, and with love.

21:44And you can't love something until you can accept it. That is correct. That is correct. Yeah. So people, a lot of people are calling this the age of fear. How do you counteract that? I know your favorite Bible verse is Matthew, the don't worry one. It is. So I say to you, do not worry for who among you by worrying could change a single hair on his head or add a single cubit to the span of his life. You know, and then it goes on from there. And, you know, sufficient, my father used to say, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Tomorrow will worry about itself. That was, I was a young man, actually, walking down the street in Chicago.

22:20It was a very, very cold day. It's common in Chicago. And there were Gideons giving out Bibles. They're handing out the New Testament Proverbs and Psalms. And it was so cold that I had to, like, crack it over my knee because it had kind of frozen. The humidity had frozen it in place. And I opened it to that passage. And it changed my life because I had lost my faith. And I opened it to that passage in Matthew. And I was so wracked with anxiety. and it was the first time that I had read the Bible or anything that I understood the phrase, it spoke to me, because I wasn't reading it. It just spoke off the page.

22:53And the words of Christ are that for me. The words of Christ speak off the page. There's no effort for me to read them. And they just, it's like he's talking directly to us now. Wow. Yeah. So when you - With a harrowing challenge. Yeah. which is to love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemies. That's the one. That's the one. Okay, so at the beginning of this event, Super Soul Conversations, I was saying to the audience, first of all, how surprised I was that you'd said yes and that you were going to leave your show in the middle of the day and that we were going to have this, you know, uplifting these cultural conversations and not to worry.

23:36So in the privacy of your own heart, if you would open it up a little bit and share with us. Uh, are you more afraid for this country right now or more hopeful for this country right now? I'm always hopeful for this country because... See, I told you it's gonna be all right. No, our country remains the last best hope of mankind. And it is already great. This is a great country.

24:12This was a great country in the heart of the Depression. Yeah. This was a great country when we were torn apart by the Civil War. It was a great country because we are based on... Civil War and Civil Rights. Civil War and Civil Rights. Yeah. We're based on an idea that we imperfectly, a harrowing idea, a harrowing challenge that we imperfectly embody at all times, which is that all men are created equal. and then they have equal access to justice and to prosperity. And as long as that idea does not disappear, as long as our Constitution is not changed from that idea, and of course the non-constitutional inspirational document like the Declaration of Independence, as long as we always keep that, there will be good presidents and there will be bad presidents.

24:53There will be good Congresses and backgrounds. There will be good judiciary and bad judiciary. But if we can all agree on that thing, then America will always be the last best hope of mankind. Wow. I love that. For America.

25:08Because every bit of darkness is only for now. The light always wins.

25:15That's exactly what I say in A Wrinkle in Time. Oh, really? Yes, which I'm coming on your show to talk about. I am so excited. I remember reading that book when I was in third grade. Oh, scared the hell out of me. Really? Yeah. The movie's not going to scare you, though. It's not? No, it's not going to scare you at all. Yeah. So I want to know what you're most hopeful for. what am I most hopeful for? What do I want to have happen? Or what do I think is going to happen that makes me most hopeful? Or what already exists that gives me most hope? Because those are three different things. What do I want to have happen?

25:48Yeah, what are you most hopeful for?

25:54That didn't change at all the second time you said it. No. I was hoping you were going to explain your question. You know what? I would know what would give me hope, and what to a certain extent does give me hope, is that I, for years, was wondering what happened to socially conscious music. And I missed songs like, top 40 songs, like, come on people now, smile on each other, everybody get together, try to love one another right now. That love is not a bad word, that we can say love, or I love you, or love is the every only God. Like to say that love is the most important thing and to mean it without embarrassment.

26:34I mean, six months before my show started, Spike Jones, the great director and pretty good actor too, he came by, he just said, do you need any help starting your show? And I'm like, sure, let's talk. So he just came by and he interviewed me six months before my show went on the air about what I wanted the show to be. And after we'd been on the air for a while and he actually sent it to me this past year, he sent those notes back to me to say, I want to remind you what your intention was. And one of the things he said that he sort of circled or pointed out in it was, I don't know how to do a nightly comedy show that's also about love.

27:10But I'd like it in some way to be about love. And there's so many different ways to express that, I suppose. And that's always... That's what you had said. That's what I said to him in the interview, which he showed back to me as a reminder. And when I look at the show that we're doing right now, I hope that I think it's interesting that you set an intention for it I live through that I live that and then you start and you don't know how to find it and that gives you all kinds of but wasn't that helpful? not knowing the way helped you find the way right because anything is possible and it was ridiculous for me to think it wasn't going to be agonizing to do in public which it was because you want to know what you're doing I'm an improviser by heart That's how I started in comedy.

27:56But still, you want everything you do to be successful. Right. But you can't be. And it's always going to be painful to make a transition or a change like that. But you know, the thing... Anyway, the hope for love. Yeah. The hope for love. And I think now we found it is that I love my country. I love science. I love facts. I love people regardless of their race or their gender identity. And the challenge now is to love the people who don't seem to have that value in their heart, or at least how it's politically expressed. I don't know what's in their heart. How it's politically expressed. Even the people I disagree most with, if I sat down and had this conversation with them, we might leave the conversation hand in hand.

28:28But when we're making jokes about people's political action, it's very hard to see them as more than their ideas. And you cannot love their ideas, you can only love their selves. Yes. And so that's the challenge. The last challenge is to love the people you disagree with the most. To love the people you disagree with the most. Right, but that's the harrowing challenge that Christ sets forth, to love the people you disagree with most, because loving the people you agree with, anybody can do that. That's right. Yeah, anybody can do that. That means you have to find a path to love Donald Trump. Yeah, that's true.

29:18I didn't say I was a good Catholic. I was bad Catholic. So thank you for doing a show about love every night. Thank you for making the show. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.